LSU Physicist Ivan Agullo Awarded Top Gravity Research Prize

LSU Department of Physics & Astronomy Assistant Professor Ivan Agullo has received
the first place award from the Gravity Research Foundation for his essay titled “Gravity
and Handedness of Photons,” which he co-authored with Adrian del Rio and Jose Navarro-Salas,
from the Spain’s Universidad de Valencia. Adrian del Rio visited LSU for a period
of three months in 2016, to work with Agullo in the investigations on which the awarded
essay is based.

“This contest has become very prestigious among researchers working in the
broad area of gravitation, and very top researchers compete every year,” Agullo said.
“Winning this competition has become a great international distinction.” The Gravity Research Foundation, founded in 1949, works to promote scientific
research on gravity and annually awards outstanding essays in the field of gravitational
studies. Winners of past top essay awards include Nobel Laureates and famous physicists
like Stephen Hawking, who won in 1971. The top five essays, including Agullo’s, will
be published in an issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics. He will also
receive a $4,000 award. Agullo received the foundation’s top essay award in 2011 for
his work, “Stimulated Creation of Quanta during Inflation and the Observable Universe.” Agullo received his Ph.D. in 2009 at the Universidad de Valencia and has
been an assistant professor of physics at LSU since August 2013. He specializes in
quantum mechanics, quantum gravity and cosmology. He is the only researcher from LSU
who has won this award, and the first of Spanish nationality. Agullo’s most recent research focuses on the way gravity and quantum mechanics
affect Maxwell’s Theory of Electromagnetism. More specifically, his work analyzes
how something that was believed to be fundamental symmetry of this theory, known as
electric-magnetic duality symmetry, may disappear in the presence of gravity. His
2017 essay builds on this research by analyzing how the handedness, or helicity, of
photons behaves under strong gravitational fields. This discovery may have important consequences for other areas of physics.
For instance, this research could be helpful in order to extract information about
the evolution of the universe immediately after the Big Bang by analyzing the polarization
of the photons that form the cosmic microwave background.

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